What is the impact of the ocean fine scales on phytoplankton diversity? – BIOSWOT

The fine scales (1-100 km, days to weeks) largely control the fate of surface tracers in the ocean. Model results show that this regime also drive phytoplankton community structure and diversity. However, this biodiversity process is today inadequately resolved in observations, and represents a source of indeterminacy on a number of issues related to phytoplankton, ranging from carbon export to water quality. By integrating together state-of-the-art remote sensing, data assimilation models, genomics, autonomous platforms, and automatic sampling, this project will provide observational evidence of the co-variation of finescale physics and phytoplankton diversity. These data will allow for the first time to test a number of biophysical scenarios proposed in the past. Our participation to a CLIVAR-endorsed international consortium will be instrumental to disseminate our results and general approach to other oceanic regions. The ambition of this project, shown by the large international participation and international endorsement, is to provide an important contribution to the leadership of the French research on the biophysical finescale ocean dynamics, a strategic domain in the future development of climate science.